Mobile gaming has grown at an exceptional rate over the last few years — it’s truly incredible to see how far phones have come since the days of Candy Crush, especially in terms of graphics performance. Samsung has been keen to remain a big part of this expanding market, refocusing its Galaxy Store on gaming and putting a new focus on releasing graphics driver updates. Back in 2019, Samsung and AMD announced a partnership to bring Radeon technology to smartphones. Now it looks like the fruits of that partnership are are almost within reach, as hinted at today during the Exynos 2100 event.
At the tail end of the Exynos event, Samsung teased its plans to feature an AMD GPU in its “next flagship” product. Now, the wording here is a little ambiguous. Samsung’s next flagship product is, of course, the Galaxy S21, and we know that those phones do not contain AMD graphics hardware. If that’s the case, what future flagship product did Samsung actually mean?
According to leaker Ice Universe, the 2100 announced today is only the beginning, and a future chipset, complete with an AMD GPU, will be released this year and could find its way into the Galaxy Z Fold3. I have to say, the idea of carrying a phone in my pocket that can unfold into an AMD-powered gaming tablet excites me — mobile games have already pushed the envelope for graphics further than many of us expected on current hardware, so it’ll be exciting to see what developers do once this powerful new technology arrives.
According to him, we could see these GPUs appear in the second or third quarter of this year, and they’ll be used in the next-gen Exynos 1xxx and 2xxx processors. The release times of these new processors could change as well. It’ll be interesting to see how soon Samsung can unveil these.